A quick round up of various web-related news items. First up, a new open source product entitled the "Highgate media suite" will bring OGG video decoding to Silverlight. Microsoft have just joined the SVG working group (arguably 10 years late, but it's better than nothing). Adobe promise significant improvements in Flash 10.1, including Core Animation rendering on OS X and lowered CPU usage. Finally, CoperLicht--a WebGL JavaScript 3D engine (Quake in JS will be here one day)

We've heard about Microsoft departments trying to do each other in, and Silverlight / IE is one of those areas of divide when it comes to Microsoft.

I do hope that IE9 is an awesome browser with Canvas, SVG and Video, but Microsoft have committed to nothing other than rounded corners and anti-aliasing; what a joke.

The more IE supports the standards, the more that conflicts with Silverlight which is trying to usurp those standards. This doesn’t sound like a company that understands the web very well.

Instead of making Silverlight at all, they should have first maxed out standards support in IE, then developed professional friendly design tools much like Flash studio that compile into HTML/JS/CSS/SVG and so forth; and anything they wanted to do that couldn’t be met by the standards, implement them in IE only and submit those features to become part of the standards. Both Canvas and Video (and Img by the way) were proprietary first and then accepted by other vendors and turned into standards.

then developed professional friendly design tools much like Flash studio that compile into HTML/JS/CSS/SVG and so forth;

That's a lot easier said then done. With Silverlight they wanted to bring the .net framework to the web and the cleanest way to do that is with a blank slate. With ASP Ajax they ran into problems trying to shoehorn .net into technologies that were really not designed to be pushed to that extent. The other benefit with a plug-in is that you get a consistent user experience. When you start manipulating HTML/JS/CSS in a complex manner you run into browser quirks. With a plug-in you have control over the rendering engine.

I think their main mistake has been not making a commitment to alleviating concerns over lock-in. I'm not just talking about Linux but also mobile platforms. But they have been much better to Linux than Adobe has ever been. If you recall there was a long period where Flash in Linux was a full version behind and Adobe didn't care at all.

It is also a different time than the IE6 days. With OSX having ~12% share in the US they cannot lock Siverlight to IE or Windows. Web developers would use something else if they did. They have to push Silverlight on technical merit.

I suspect one of the main motivations behind Silverlight is to provide an alternative to Flash for security and stability reasons. They probably got sick of looking at IE crash reports that showed Flash as the leading cause.

I think their main mistake has been not making a commitment to alleviating concerns over lock-in. I'm not just talking about Linux but also mobile platforms. But they have been much better to Linux than Adobe has ever been. If you recall there was a long period where Flash in Linux was a full version behind and Adobe didn't care at all.

It is also a different time than the IE6 days. With OSX having ~12% share in the US they cannot lock Siverlight to IE or Windows. Web developers would use something else if they did. They have to push Silverlight on technical merit.

I suspect one of the main motivations behind Silverlight is to provide an alternative to Flash for security and stability reasons. They probably got sick of looking at IE crash reports that showed Flash as the leading cause.

It would be very simple for Microsoft to eliminate concerns over lock-in surrounding .NET and Silverlight.

All they need do is (1) to remove Windows-only parts, such as COM, and (2) to make an irrevocable pledge that anybody may write their own implementation under any license terms of any part of it, or of all of it, including Windows.forms, ASP.NET and ADO.NET, and the VC1 codec, for any platform. If Microsoft are concerned about interoperability, they could provide test cases so that other non-Windows implementations could verify that they have a valid implementation (as is done with Java).

After all, anyone may implement Java or Flash for any platform under any license terms.

As long as Microsoft continue to fail to make such pledges then, given Microsoft's past behaviours, continued concerns over Microsoft's intentions regarding lock-in are perfectly valid. Indeed, such concerns are probably mandatory, considering the complexity of interoperability with a system such as .NET and Silverlight, and also considering that in the past Microsoft have shown that they are unable even to make a plain simple ASCII text file interoperable with existing standards.